Schism
by Clavain
Summary: Grovyle hated the future, but he hated the past more. Special episode for Chiaroscuro, but can be read as standalone.


**Special Episode: Schism**

It's cold and it's dark and being here feels better than it has any right to be. Escaping Dusknoir again did hold certain glee, but the feeling of creeping happiness he has here is different. It's because he was made here, and the acknowledgement of that cuts him so deeply that he no longer feels any warmth. There's just a small, almost pleasant, presence of belonging that haunts him.

He's fought against this darkness, hated it for decades and decades whilst throwing himself, his everything, into a seemingly futile fight. He's done everything he could do and a few things he really shouldn't have done to leave this timeless world unborn. And after all that he still missed it whilst he was in the joy of the _better_ world.

There's no life here. Trees are hollowed-out by hopelessness, the wind was blown away long ago, and the ground is infertile and cold. Rain never dared to make an appearance, and if it had it would probably have been acidic and have just run off the bleached earth. Anything and everything meaningless here. The sky is not even black, but a dark grey. There is light to see by, always, to see what a shadow of everything it has all become.

And the pokémon. Does he even need to remind himself what twisted half-memories of their former selves everything has become? The desperation, the clinging misery, and the exile from light…

He tries not to think it, but he has never been good at suppressing thoughts anyway. So, finally, after everything, he breaks his denial and thinks something true, perhaps the truest thing he has ever thought: _this is my home._

It's not that he prefers it, because here is cold and lifeless and everything is twisted. Hostile. It's difficult to live; to rest is nearly impossible, even in this eternal gloom, and breathing is unexpectedly hard because the air is thick and tries to choke you. This world is a ruin. No, worse than that, because ruins are passive and it actively makes everything worse that comes here. It's as degenerate as Primal Dialga, seeking only to corrupt and to preserve itself.

But the past was only cruel. Every moment of sunlight and beauty only served to remind him just how corrupt he was in comparison. In the future he was a beacon. In the past he was a shadow, a quiet, dark thing, best ignored, and a thief. It was so perfect being there but it just antagonized his ache for the new world, because he felt so utterly inadequate compared to everything there. If the pokémon in the future were just shadows then those in the past were mere projections onto a screen, shallow without any depth of understanding suffering or appreciating what they had.

He hated them more than he hated his own people, those of the future. It was understandable, really, that when faced with this darkness a pokémon would deform into monsters or recluses, these multiple complexes they developed were justified. He sympathized – no, empathized – with them and what they were. He felt no anger at their hopeless cruelty, thought of them when he thought of his quest. _I am saving them from becoming their own worst enemy,_ he told himself.

But in the past he saw what he really fought to protect. There was still cruelty (it held less meaning and justification than ever), but everything else was just alien. They were so _happy_ , and he couldn't use that to justify how he resented them, but he couldn't stop the hatred either. There was no suffering, just this light and warmth in each of them that he could never own, never manufacture, and it made him wish to preserve what he had because he fitted in so poorly there. He had dedication and vision, something they lacked, but he still ached. He would always ache.

Of course, fitting in wouldn't matter with his plan. There was no return, and he would be glad of it if it wasn't for Ashen.

Their friendship had survived the darkness. It had been something _good_ , something relatively bright and impossibly strong in a deteriorated world. He had heard it said that there were no friends in the darkness, only allies, but he had proven it wrong. In the past it all seemed meaningless, and he wondered that the new him, the him who had never spent so long on one goal, would be the same. It was odd, they had always thought themselves spectacular for being able to withstand the darkness together, but he wondered if their friendship would survive the light.

Because, in the end, he was weary and filled with years of blackness. It built itself into his bones, infiltrated his identity, and before he knew it the darkness and the planet's paralysis were a part of him. They were killing him, slowly, and without Ashen he would already be one of the poor wretches he fancied himself a saviour to. With Ashen he would give it another twenty years.

Ageing was different here. You were young until suddenly something twisted happened and you weren't. It was different, not a gradient but a sudden spike. He was certain that they were not proportionate. Sometimes he wondered if occasionally an egg aged out of existence before it had ever been born.

He should have died long ago, at any rate. Ashen too. He supposed that was one of the darkness's gifts to him.

He glanced behind himself at the pair following him as he raced across the road. He hadn't hated the vulpix and zorua like he had the others, maybe it was because they were in the darkness now. Their friendship was peculiar, possibly strong enough to survive here even if they didn't return with him. Of course it wasn't a question of surviving it or not, it was a question of how long. Their purity wouldn't do them any favours here.

 _That vulpix is Ashen,_ and the memory hit him again, more forcefully than ever. She was so different… he did not want to admit that all of her better qualities had been caused by the darkness. Still, there was something beautiful to seeing her innocence. She fitted in the bright past, and that hurt him more than anything had ever, because he couldn't and she deserved it, but-

She was still disappearing when they prevented the planet's paralysis. It would mean more to her now. He could see, having experienced the glory of the sunlight, why the human Ashen had been so willing to accept that they would disappear. They did not fit and they could never fit. But this new Ashen, she deserved the chance that she had received with her amnesia. So he turned around in the rocky path to face her and the zorua.

"I need to tell you something." He murmurs, barely able to look at her, "It's important."

She nods and he sees a flicker of the Ashen he knows before she is gone again.

"In the past –here– we were all tattered, our sentience fraying at the edges. Not just the feral pokémon, but even us, because the darkness was so all-encompassing that it bled into us and ruined everything. It was all just a matter of how much time you could endure it for before you joined the wailing masses of the hopeless. I always knew that the time with you as my friend wouldn't be forever," _although there's another reason for that too,_ he added in his head, "but I'm glad it ended this way.

"You see, we still had something you'll never have. A certain resilience, companionship so important that you'd die without it, intricate spider webs of light holding us together and keeping the darkness at bay. You lack these – you swim in the light and you grow from it. But we – I – grew in the darkness like a tree in the side of a cliff. It burned us, constantly, and we strove for light, yet the sunrise just made me feel hollow. We're different, alien to your light, and all being in the past did was highlight how much the darkness malformed me.

"There's nothing for me in the past and there was nothing for you either. But then you lost yourself and were remade in this glowing light of the past sun, and suddenly you belonged in the right place. I'm glad you got to spend this time in the light, even if I only recognize tiny traces of you. It's odd to see which of your qualities were caused by sunless misery – but I suppose that doesn't matter, not really. The goal will be fulfilled, and we always knew how it would end.

"There's so much I could tell you about yourself from before, but that too isn't relevant. You always said that our suffering had meaning and I think it's important to know that to understand who you were. But, in the end, no one's suffering has meaning, not even yours.

"Do not grieve who you were, there is no time in which to mourn here. I am sorry, I am so sorry, because no one should have to be here. But I'm glad you had a chance to live in the past. And if we do this properly, we may be able to return to the past yet." _I can't tell then that she'll die,_ he acknowledged, and he did not try to make himself.

"How?" New Ashen looked at him with sad, soft eyes, and he realized slightly too late that he had just tainted her new purity. There was no point in regretting that now.

"Celebi is a pokémon who controls the flow of time. We should be able to reach her, and she can use the Passage of Time to transport us into the past."

She nodded, like it was something she already knew, and they resumed their run.

 _Should I tell her?_ He asked himself, _She hated Celebi more than I've ever hated anyone. Celebi is the mastermind behind everything we did and Ashen always insisted that she had been driven completely insane by the darkness. Apparently more so than Primal Dialga. She said that Celebi had no qualms about anything, that for her the fact that we'd never existed meant that anything could happen to us. But the time-traveller never treated us that badly, that I recall…_

And then all too suddenly he made a connection he had not seen before. Two memories, the first Ashen casually dropping in conversation that Celebi had made sure Grovyle would want to fight the darkness, and the second Celebi comforting Grovyle that in the new future he wouldn't be born alone. How had she known..?

His birth: alone, in the darkness, born in the carcass of a tree. Deserted by his parents, or…

No. It would be stupid to accuse Celebi of an act like that based on a few words. That he had been born alone would be a safe assumption to make. Anyway, that also didn't matter; soon they would be in the past again and then they would cease to be. Grudges were meaningless.

The suspicion still ate at him like woodworm. He decided that ceasing to be would be nice and uncomplicated.

Grovyle raced forward and let everything blur.

But when he met Celebi she used her telepathy on him without asking, as she had promised that she never would, he was certain of it because she would not look him in the eye.

He couldn't confront her, he was too tired and this new Ashen taxed his soul just by being. He withdrew from everyone and remembered the words Ashen had first told him, the first thing she had ever said,

" _Because this entire world is absurd and if we can't enjoy it then there's no point, nothing to lose, so let's at least try to fight it."_

Once he would have smiled at that, but the darkness and his journey had long since eroded that feeling to nothing. He could see with hindsight how that was just glass bravado, transparent and fragile, no bitter truth. It didn't matter, anyway, because soon none of this would have ever been. He would never have heard her.

And then there would be light.

He heard the zorua say quietly to the vulpix – Ashen – the shadow of his partner –, not intending to be overheard,

"The light has no power here."

"The darkness is empty without it," was her murmured reply that would have gone unheard if this world was not so still, so unnaturally still (how could he have forgotten how still it was here?), "and our light holds far more meaning now I have seen it. I feel that the sun will outshine me."

Human Ashen had once said those exact words, in her sleep. He remembers her nightmare mutterings, there was no rest in this land of the damned and dying and already dead. She used to dream about her family, but she confessed to him that she chose to let the memories of them fade. She had said that she had held onto them for far too long, that they were just an exercise in futility.

He sighed. They'd agreed that the end justified the means, even that kind of loss, but he was still glad that he didn't have to let his memories of Ashen fade. They were close enough to the end now that it didn't matter.

And then, suddenly, it struck him that all that had been his Ashen existed only in his head. Without her memories so many of the things they did together were already forgotten and might as well have never been.

Of course, he would also cease. But it worried him far less than it once had.

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

This was originally written as a tag-on to my other PMD fic Chiaroscuro, a Special Episode I was going to put in the middle. Since that has been discontinued and this can stand on its own I decided to post it here, even though I'm not happy with the ending.

Also this, like Chiaroscuro, is all about the duality of self.

Just going to post some Chiaroscuro backstory here even though it's the wrong place because why the hell not haha

Basically it's called Chiaroscuro because it's about a sharp contrast of light and dark - new, light, Ashen trying to manage the remains of another individual Past Ashen in her self. It's about how much she was affected by her past and how much of a different person she was now, how she has to deal with her existence erasing that of another (Grovyle's friend), and how she's fragmented and clashing as an individual. There's this sense of comparison in which Ashen is better, and a demonstration on how bad the dark future was because of how poorly Ashen's instincts inherited from her past human self mislead her in the fic.

Mostly it was about Ashen forging an identity at the same time as searching to recover her memories - so forging an identity whilst she's trying to find a premade one and then rejecting her past self.


End file.
